Friday, July 17, 2015

Music to Move To

Taking a page from my students’ notebooks, I return to a favorite
topic. Kids variously call it tunes, beats, bars, choons.... however their slang for it evolves, its own language never needs translation.

So, today—music
that quickens my pulse, fourteen years after the first listening:

I first encountered Hindemith’s Symphonic Metamorphosis as a student at Eastern Music Festival in
Greensboro, North Carolina in 2001. I
had the rare privilege (for me) of being principal second violin that week, so
most of my evenings were spent listening to the CD while marking bowings and
cues.

Hindemith’s music infected me from the first note. Its vaguely
psychedelic remix of Weber’s nineteenth-century melodies, its sonic color
splashes and razor-sharp rhythms, gripped mind and body—it was agonizing to restrain
my foot-tapping during rehearsals and performance. He tricks out Weber’s phrases
in full-throated twentieth-century harmonies, jazz syncopation, and jubilantly
wide-ranging instrumentation. His methods of “metamorphosing” Weber’s music
vary, but one of my favorites occurs at the end of movement two. Here, Weber’s melody line gorgeously
decomposes— or rather, it is lovingly dismembered: the timpani makes the first real
cut, tossing around hunks of melody line before ceding them to the woodwinds
and other percussionists, who atomize the phrases into just-recognizable fragments (11:30 in video - performed by the Orquestra Sinfonica do Estado de Sao Paulo).